What's New in Spell Catcher X version 10.1.3

Improved Checking of Word Pairs

Previous versions of Spell Catcher X were able to check word pairs during Check Selection ("San Francisco", for instance). Starting in version 10.1.3, Spell Catcher can check the spelling of and expand shorthand abbreviations for word pairs (two words separated by white space). This also makes it possible to use Ignore All for repeated word errors.

As an example, if you commonly make a typo such as "andt he" (the space is typed too late or too early), you can define a shorthand abbreviation "andt he" --> "and the" to automatically correct it. This works in both interactive checking (via the input method) and during Check Selection.

Two new checkboxes have been added to the Interactive pane of Spell Catcher's Preferences window to control word pair checking and expanding:

Check Selection Text Scaling and Wrapping Controls

There are two new controls in the Check Selection window - a pop-up menu to choose a scaling (zoom) factor for the displayed text, and a checkbox to control the way word wrapping is performed.

Neither of these settings affect the actual formatting of the text being checked - only the way it is displayed in the Check Selection window.

More About "Force Wrapping"

If you are checking a selection of text that has paragraphs formatted with a specific width, you may observe that wide paragraphs are sometimes "clipped" when drawn in the Check Selection window. The Force wrapping checkbox is useful for this particular situation.

When Force wrapping is checked, a different (older) method is used to layout and draw the text being checked. This method is not compatible with bi-directional or right-to-left text, and draws with a slightly different line spacing. This is somewhat of a "quick fix", but it does work and was a lot easier to implement than a page layout view in the Check Selection window.

Two new checkboxes have been added to the Spelling pane, Check Selection tab of Spell Catcher's Preferences window to set the defaults for these controls. Generally you would change these on a per-application basis. You can always change them on-the-fly from within the Check Selection window itself. Note that changing the scaling or wrapping while in the Check Selection window does not affect the preferences.

Easier Updating

Starting in version 10.1.3, it is now possible to update your Spell Catcher installation in a single restart.

Fixes, Changes and Enhancements

More changes to the way the Spell Catcher application is built to try to ensure that it's possible to launch Spell Catcher prebound (i.e. optimized application launching) on any version of OS X that it runs on. The result is actually a slightly smaller executable that uses a little less memory as well.

More performance improvements to Check Selection. Even with the new addition to expand abbreviations that consist of word pairs (which potentially doubles the number of times Spell Catcher checks to see if a word/word pair is an abbreviation), Check Selection is up to 20% faster than before.

Words ending with a colon are no longer always considered valid URLs.

Fixed a problem where all Learned Words would randomly become unavailable. This was a bug in Spell Catcher, but the circumstances when it would actually occur are still unclear. This was a rare problem.

Fixed small memory leak related to Look Up results from the Dictionary Definitions, along with a couple of other even smaller leaks.

Work around a bug in Word 2004 where it will hang (or otherwise misbehave) when more than 127 characters are sent to it by an input method at once (or, if it were possible, by a Unicode keyboard layout).

Fixed a problem with the "Make replacements directly (without backspacing) where possible" feature (instantaneous replacements) when making spelling corrections from the Suggest Spelling window in MLTE views (a few Carbon applications use these). One known affected application was Yahoo! Messenger, there are probably a handful of others.

Fixed a problem where the Learn Word command in the input menu would sometimes fail, primarily if the Suggest Spelling window wasn't open or had not yet been opened. This also affected the Learn Word speech command when the Suggest Spelling window wasn't open.

The Learn Word menu command is now enabled for both spelling and capitalization errors.

Ignore All now works with repeated word errors (missing capital errors aren't valid for Ignore All). Note that Ignore All words are case sensitive - "had had" is not the same as "Had Had".

Improved the feedback for the Learn Word speech command.

More informative help tags for some of the buttons in the Suggest Spelling window.

Input method now compatible with Mariner Write 3.6.

Fix for a very rare problem where the Set Language submenu in the input menu could be empty, as well as the Language pop-up menu in the Suggest Spelling window.

Fixed a problem introduced in Spell Catcher X 10.1.2's input method where the Check Selection (and Check All) commands from either the input menu or Dock menu could fail with a "No readable text was found in the pasteboard" error, after a 30-second or so communication time-out. This did not affect the Check Selection command in the Services/Spell Catcher menu, and would only occur if Spell Catcher was the active input method.